It might be a bit overkill for the Academy to have awarded Olivia Colman three Oscar nominations in four years, but the multi-layered ball of repressed pride and externalized self-doubt that Colman plays here is the performance of the year in my book.
The film is set in a theater in a small English town in 1981 and though it focuses on Olivia Colman's character of Hilary, there's a rich slice-of-life quality to it.
Sam Mendes has long had a knack of capturing the atmospheres of time and place: The suburban purgatory of American Beauty, the sepia-toned Depression-era Midwest of Road to Perdition, the hellish warscapes of Iraq in Jarhead and World War I in 1917.
At the same time, Mendes tries to equate a cinema in 1981 as the height of theatergoing, when he's at least 40 years removed from the era of movie palaces and grand showings. There's a curious vagueness here from a director who's generally so exacting with his showings. It's also hard to get a grip on exactly what kind of an English town this is: Vaguely somewhere that's not London is as much as I can gather.
The crust of Hilary's arc is that it throws her into two relationships: A numbing dalliance with her cheating boss (Colin Firth) and a May-December romance (Michael Ward as Stephen) that's as dreamy as the movies that Hilary and her crew never actually get around to watching (irony alert!). Colman plays the self-loathing with the former and the genuine affection with the latter beautifully.
There's also the obligatory referencing of the times (the Thatcher era) and the racism involved in Ward's character. It's a sure bet that any film that attempts to discuss race (particularly by a White director) will have loud critics whatever you do, so it's best to just ignore that: This isn't a film with any profound proscribed solutions to race, but the existence of a Black character in a more racist era than the present is dealt realistically and in a way that serves the story.
The film picks up significantly in the second act with two or three strong twists that are cleverly deployed. Even when it's dragging, the mood works.
Despite the film fee.
The film is set in a theater in a small English town in 1981 and though it focuses on Olivia Colman's character of Hilary, there's a rich slice-of-life quality to it.
Sam Mendes has long had a knack of capturing the atmospheres of time and place: The suburban purgatory of American Beauty, the sepia-toned Depression-era Midwest of Road to Perdition, the hellish warscapes of Iraq in Jarhead and World War I in 1917.
At the same time, Mendes tries to equate a cinema in 1981 as the height of theatergoing, when he's at least 40 years removed from the era of movie palaces and grand showings. There's a curious vagueness here from a director who's generally so exacting with his showings. It's also hard to get a grip on exactly what kind of an English town this is: Vaguely somewhere that's not London is as much as I can gather.
The crust of Hilary's arc is that it throws her into two relationships: A numbing dalliance with her cheating boss (Colin Firth) and a May-December romance (Michael Ward as Stephen) that's as dreamy as the movies that Hilary and her crew never actually get around to watching (irony alert!). Colman plays the self-loathing with the former and the genuine affection with the latter beautifully.
There's also the obligatory referencing of the times (the Thatcher era) and the racism involved in Ward's character. It's a sure bet that any film that attempts to discuss race (particularly by a White director) will have loud critics whatever you do, so it's best to just ignore that: This isn't a film with any profound proscribed solutions to race, but the existence of a Black character in a more racist era than the present is dealt realistically and in a way that serves the story.
The film picks up significantly in the second act with two or three strong twists that are cleverly deployed. Even when it's dragging, the mood works.
Despite the film fee.